Linus Torvalds Quotes

I appreciate all the devices the Windows people are coming up with, but the operating system... I just want to smash it.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

I'm worried about the future of computer operating systems, as they all seem to be sliding towards a more controlled experience, taking away much of what makes PC games so much fun.

The definition of an 'operating system' is bound to evolve with customer demands and technological possibilities.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

Microsoft's new OS, Windows 7, may finally be a worthy successor to XP, eliminating the clutter of Vista and letting users get to what they want to use without the fuss. All this, while remaining compatible with their IT departments' demands for scalability and custom implementations.

Corporations want stable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain systems.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.

And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

If you don't fix latent failures in your system, you're asking for trouble.

FreeBSD has a nicely tuned network stack and extremely good reliability.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.

Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

I've never owned an Apple product. I like the fact that PCs are open architecture and not locked down like Apple products. I feel that Macs are also unjustifiably overpriced.

I couldn't tell you in any detail how my computer works. I use it with a layer of automation.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.

Our system must remain solvent as we attempt a solution to this great problem of security. Else we have lost the battle from within that we are trying to win from without.